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1127 

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No. 7 


DREAM 

OF 

STARS 



COPYRIGHT DFPOSIT 
















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DREAM 

OF 

STARS 


COMPILED BY WORKERS OF THE 
WRITERS’ PROGRAM OF THE WORK 
PROJECTS ADMINISTRATION IN THE 
COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 


—JUNIOR PRESS BOOKS- 

albertXwh itman 

&" 4co 

CHICAGO 1940 







PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION 
State-wide Sponsors of the 
Pennsylvania Writers’ Project 

FEDERAL WORKS AGENCY 
John M. Carmody, Administrator 

WORK PROJECTS ADMINISTRATION 
F. C. Harrington, Commissioner 
Florence Kerr, Assistant Commissioner 
Philip Mathews, State Administrator 




RECEIVED 


JUN 141940 


COPYRIGHT OFFICE 


Co-sponsored and copyrighted, 1940, by Division of Extension Education 


Board of Public Education, Philadelphia 


*■ uuuLdtiuii) r midi 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 


PREFACE 


Dream of Stars is the seventh in the Children's 
Science Series. It was prepared by the Phila¬ 
delphia Unit of the Pennsylvania Writers' 
Project, sponsored by the Pennsylvania Depart¬ 
ment of Public Instruction. 

This booklet was written by Mark Bartman. 
It was edited by Katharine Britton, of the 
State office staff. 

Acknowledgment is made to Wagner Schles- 
inger, Associate Director in charge of Astron¬ 
omy, Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, for acting 
as consultant to assure accuracy of the text and 
illustrations. 

Color illustrations for jacket and book are the 
work of David Cain. All other illustrations are 
the work of Mary Procopio, Russell Worman, 
and Charles Rossner. 

Conrad C. Lesley 
Acting State Supervisor 



EVEN THROUGH THIS POWERFUL TELESCOPE THE STARS LOOK 
LIKE PINPOINTS OF LIGHT. 

























DREAM OF STARS 


If we stand on a city street and look up 
at the sky, the stars seem dim and far 
away. The lights of the city blind us. 
Tall buildings black out great parts of the 
sky. 

But let us go out and climb a hill some 
clear summer night. The city’s lights 
and buildings are left far behind. The 
sky seems like a soft blue velvet curtain 
over our heads. And the stars are scat¬ 
tered over it like diamonds. 

As we stand looking upward, we are 
doing something that men have done 
from the beginning of history. Wise men 


6 


CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 


and shepherds of old gazed in wonder at 
the same pinpoints of light. What were 
they made of? How did they come to be 
up there in the sky? 

People watched the heavens to find 
answers to these questions. The study of 
the stars is the oldest of all sciences. 
We call it Astronomy. 

EARLY ASTRONOMY 

People of long ago knew much less 
about the world than we do. Often they 
believed things that were not true. 

They saw many groups of stars up in 
the sky. They gave each group a name, 
and made up stories to tell how it came 
to be where it was. These groups are 
the constellations. 

The constellations were named for gods 
and giants, heroes and beautiful girls, 
fish and dragons and horses. The bright 
wide belt that runs across the sky over- 



THE BRIGHT WIDE BELT THAT CROSSES THE SKY OVERHEAD 
IS THE MILKY WAY. 



8 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

head was thought to be a road that the 
sky people traveled over. 

On a clear summer night we can find 
that bright road today. We call it the 
Milky Way. 

And we can find the stars of each 
constellation too. We may be surprised 
when we first see them. To us most of 
them do not even seem to have the shape 
of any living thing. But we still call the 
stars and the constellations by the names 
given to them by the people of long ago. 

The very first astronomers learned one 
important thing about the stars. They 
saw that every year at the same time the 
stars were in the same place in the sky. 

As soon as men knew that, they could 
make use of the stars in many ways. By 
watching the sky they could tell what 
time of the year it was. They could keep 
track of time, and they could make a 
calendar. 


DREAM OF STARS 


9 


They discovered, too, that one star 
never moved at all. It always shone 
directly to the north. So they called it 
the North Star, or the Pole Star. Now 
they could go farther on the sea in ships. 
As long as the captain could see the 
North Star, he knew which way he was 
going. 

Early astronomers also learned that all 
the stars seemed to move together. They 
moved as if they were stuck to a great 
ball turning around the earth. No star 
ever appeared to come closer to another 
star or get farther away from it. So men 
said the stars were fixed. 

But early astronomers were soon sur¬ 
prised to see that not quite all the stars 
were fixed stars. Five stars seemed to 
move differently from the others. Some¬ 
times they rose in one part of the sky, 
sometimes in another. Sometimes all 
five of them could be seen, sometimes 


10 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 



TWO BRIGHT STARS IN THE BIG BEAR POINT TO THE NORTH 
STAR. 


none. And because they acted in this 
strange way, the early astronomers called 
them planets. That means wanderers. 

Now even in those days not all the 
people believed that the stars were gods 
and heroes. There were wise men at 
work who knew those were just make- 
believe stories. They tried to find out 
the truth. 

One of these wise men was an Egyptian 


DREAM OF STARS 11 

named Ptolemy. Ptolemy had watched 
the sky very carefully. He knew that 
the sun seemed to move across the sky in 
the daytime. At night the stars and the 
moon moved across the sky. 

Ptolemy was more clever than most of 
the people of his time. He figured out 
that the earth must be round. And he 
was right about that. 

Ptolemy thought that the earth was set 
inside a great hollow ball. The inside of 
this ball was the sky. On its surface 
were set the stars, each in its place. 
Within the big ball were smaller glass¬ 
like balls that held the sun and the moon 
and the planets. 

Ptolemy thought the earth was stand¬ 
ing still in the center of the great ball. 
And all the balls circled around the 
earth. So the stars and the sun and the 
moon and the planets seemed to ride 
across the sky. 


12 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

Most people did not believe that any of 
Ptolemy’s ideas were right. They be¬ 
lieved that the earth was flat. Astrono¬ 
mers knew that the earth must be round. 
But a few astronomers thought Ptolemy 
was wrong about the glass-like balls. A 
short time after Columbus discovered 
America, a truer idea was given to the 
world by Copernicus, a man from Poland. 

COPERNICUS 

Copernicus said that the stars and the 
sun did not turn around the earth. In¬ 
stead, it was the earth that was turning! 
The sun and the stars were not really 
moving. 

Sometimes when we are riding on a 
train it seems as though the trees outside 
are moving quickly past us. But the 
trees only seem to be moving. The truth 
is that the train is moving past the trees. 
In the same way, the sun and the stars 


DREAM OF STARS 


13 


seem to be moving over the earth in the 
sky. But it is the earth that is really 
moving. 

The earth is turning like a top. And 
as it turns, half of it is always facing the 
sun, and half of it is in darkness. When 
the United States is facing the sun, we 
have daylight. When the United States 
is turned away from the sun, we have 
night. 

There are stars all around the world, 
but we can see them only at night. The 
sun shines so brightly in the daytime that 
it outshines the stars. 

So the stars disappear in the daytime. 
But at night they appear again, and 
move together across the sky. 

Suppose some night after dark we look 
at the sky. Then we look at it again two 
hours later. The stars have moved over 
to the west a little! 

Now if we look at the sky a month later 


14 CHILDREN'S SCIENCE SERIES 

at the same time, we see that the stars 
have moved even farther to the west. 
In the east are some stars that were not 
there a month before. 

The reason for this change night after 
night is that every night the place where 
we are on the earth is turned toward a 
slightly different part of the sky. The 
earth is moving in a wide circle around 
the sun, and every night it is at a different 
place in the heavens. 

When one year has passed, the earth 
is in the place from which it started. 
And so every year at the same time the 
stars look exactly the same. 

Other astronomers who came after 
Copernicus found out that he had been 
right. But it was a long time before 
everyday people could believe that the 
earth on which they lived was not the 
center of the whole world. And as as¬ 
tronomers found out more about the stars, 


DREAM OF STARS 15 

people had to learn to believe even 
stranger things. 

THROUGH THE TELESCOPE 
About three hundred years ago an 
Italian named Galileo heard about some¬ 
thing which made it possible to find out 
much more about the heavens. This 
thing was a telescope. 

The telescope is a long tube with special 
pieces of glass in it that make things far 
away seem bigger. It is something like 
field glasses, but is very much stronger. 

During the three hundred years that 
have passed since Galileo first made a 
telescope for star study, men have been 
making bigger and better telescopes. 
And with these powerful telescopes, as¬ 
tronomers have found out some very 
exciting things about the stars. 

With the telescope people could see 
that there were many, many more stars 


16 


CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 



THIS TELESCOPE WAS NEW MORE THAN 250 YEARS AGO. 


than they had ever dreamed of. Even 
Galileo’s first weak telescope showed that 
the Milky Way was not just a cloud 
pathway across the sky. It was made of 
millions of stars, crowded close together. 









DREAM OF STARS 17 

Using nothing but our own eyes, we 
can see about six thousand stars. But 
with the latest telescope we can see one 
thousand million! There are many more, 
so far away that we cannot see them 
even through the telescope. Astrono¬ 
mers tell us that there are probably a 
hundred billion in our own neighborhood. 
And there are at least one million such 
neighborhoods! 

The number of stars is so great that 
we can scarcely think of what it means. 
There are fifty times as many stars in 
our neighborhood as there are people on 
the whole earth. 

BILLIONS OF SUNS 

What are these billions of bright stars 
in the sky? They are suns! They are 
not small bright pinpoints at all. They 
are great glowing suns, some of them 
thousands of times bigger than our own 



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DREAM OF STARS 


19 


sun. They look small because they are 
so far away. A kite also looks small 
when it is high up in the air. 

The stars are very much higher than 
any kite could fly. Some of them are so 
far away that if we could think of going 
on and on for many years we could still 
not think of how far they are. 

Suppose we tried to write out the dis¬ 
tance to the stars in miles. The numbers 
would stretch right across a whole page. 
So astronomers have thought of a simpler 
way to tell how far away the stars are. 
They tell the distance by the amount of 
time it takes the light from the stars to 
reach us. 

We all know that light travels with 
terrific speed. Lightning flashes across 
the sky so fast that it is gone almost 
before we see it. Light moves thousands 
and thousands of times faster than our 
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could flash around the whole earth seven 
and one-half times in one second. In 
one second it travels 186,000 miles! 

Yet the nearest star is so far away that 
it takes the light from it four years to 
get to the earth. Many stars are so far 
that the light reaching us from them 
now started before Jesus was born. That 
was two thousand years ago. Some are 
much farther than that. 

One of the nearest stars is Sirius. 
Sirius is in the southern part of the sky 
in the winter time. It seems like the 
very brightest and biggest of all the stars 
in the sky. But that is not true. Sirius 
looks big and bright partly because it is 
much nearer than the other stars. Some 
of the dimmest stars are really hundreds 
of times bigger than our own sun. Sirius 
is only three times bigger than the sun. 

One of the very biggest stars is Antares, 
another winter star. Antares is so big 


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24 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 


that it looks bright even though it is 
much farther away than Sirius. It is 
one of the brightest stars in the sky. 

Antares is more than a million times 
bigger than our sun. Betelgeuse, an¬ 
other bright star in the southern part of 
the winter sky, is more than half a million 
times as big as our sun. So we can see 
that our sun is very small beside the 
other heavenly bodies. 

The largest stars are called giants. 
And the smaller ones are dwarfs. Betel¬ 
geuse and Antares are giants, but our 
sun is a dwarf. 

We might think that the giants would 
always be much heavier than the dwarfs, 
because they are so much bigger. But 
that is not always true. Betelgeuse is 
light and thin, almost like a shining 
cloud. It is so thin that the earth could 
pass through it just as we would walk 
through a fog. 


DREAM OF STARS 25 

WHAT MAKES THE STARS BRIGHT? 

If we watch the stars carefully on a 
clear moonless night, we see that they 
are not all the same color. Sirius looks 
blue-white. Antares looks orange-red. 
Betelgeuse looks red. Others look green, 
or yellow, or pure white. 

All these great balls are shining with 
a great light. And they are very, very 
hot. Anything that came close to them 
would be burned to nothing in an instant. 
We are lucky that they are so far away. 
If they were close they would bum up 
the earth. 

The stars are glowing as an electric 
bulb glows when we turn on the elec¬ 
tricity. The wire in the bulb gets so hot 
that it shines. Iron also gets bright 
when it is heated. The great heat of the 
stars makes them glow in much the same 
way. 

Now the light of the electric bulb is a 


26 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 


different color from that of the hot iron. 
This is because the wire in the bulb is 
much hotter than the red-hot iron. If 
we heated the iron more, it too would get 
brighter and whiter. 

This is true also of the stars. 

Astronomers tell us that some of the 
stars are hotter than others. The very 
hottest ones are blazing white. Those 
not quite so hot are yellow, and those less 
hot than the yellow ones are red. 

Astronomers used to think that all 
stars began as red stars and grew hotter 
until they were white. Then they were 
thought to cool off and get red again. 
But astronomers do not believe this any 
longer. 

Today some astronomers believe that 
perhaps all stars just keep on getting 
hotter and hotter. If this is true, our 
own sun may some day be white like 
Sirius. But it would take millions of 


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28 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 


millions of years for this to happen. 

So we cannot be sure that the ordinary 
stars change. If they do, they change so 
slowly that we would see no difference in 
them even if we watched for many years. 

STARS THAT CHANGE 

But while we cannot see any change 
in most of the stars, there are some in 
which we can see a change in color and 
in brightness. These are called variable 
stars. 

Some of the variable stars are like 
balloons. For a certain length of time 
they swell, just as a balloon does when 
we blow air into it. Then they look big 
and bright. After a while they get small 
again, as a balloon does when we let the 
air out of it. And then they look dim. 
No one knows why this happens, but we 
know that they are swelling and shrink¬ 
ing all the time. 


DREAM OF STARS 29 

But this is not the only kind of variable 
star. 

If we look at the star map, we see a 
star called Algol. And if we watch Algol 
in the sky, we see that every three days 
it gets very dim. It stays dim for a few 
hours, then it gets bright again. 

For hundreds of years men had known 
that the star did this. But no one knew 
why it happened. That was why the 
Arabs called the star Algol. For Algol 
means demon, or devil. The Arabs 
thought there was some black magic in 
this star. 

And then, not so long ago, astronomers 
had a new idea about what made Algol 
get dim every few days. Suppose there 
was another darker star that was circling 
around Algol. Suppose this darker star 
got in front of Algol every few days. 
Then the light from the brighter Algol 
could not reach the earth. Only light from 


30 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 


the dim star would be seen. They tested 
the idea and found that it was right. 

Astronomers know now that very many 
of the stars in our neighborhood have 
other stars traveling with them. Often 
there are two stars close together. Some¬ 
times there are three or more. But to 
us they always look like just one star. 
They are so far away that we cannot see 
the space between them without a tele¬ 
scope. The North Star is really two 
stars. Sirius has another star with it. 
Perhaps half the stars have companions. 

The change we see in variable stars is 
a change in brightness only. None of 
the stars seem to change in any other 
way. If we watched the sky all our lives, 
we could never see one star move closer 
to another, or farther away. The shape 
of the constellations does not seem to 
change. We can always find each star 
right where it was last year at the same 
time. 



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OUR SKIES IN THE WINTER, 







32 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

DO THE STARS MOVE? 

Yet these fixed stars really are moving. 
They are flashing through space many 
times faster than our fastest airplanes. 
Our sun is traveling twelve miles a 
second. That means seven hundred 
miles a minute, and forty-two thousand 
miles an hom 1 ! 

The sun is rushing along through 
space, carrying the earth with it. It is 
rushing in the direction of Vega, the 
brightest star in the summer sky. In 
the middle of the summer, we can see 
Vega shining very bright and white, 
almost right over our heads. 

But the sun will not be anywhere near 
Vega for a long time. It is rushing very 
fast, but Vega is very far away. Many 
hundreds of thousands of years must 
pass before our sun gets near the place 
where Vega is now. By that time, Vega 
will be somewhere else. 


DREAM OF STARS 


33 


The other stars are moving too. Some 
of them are moving more slowly than the 
sun. Some of them are moving much 
faster. The hottest stars seem to move 
more slowly. Most of the hottest stars 
travel about seven miles a second. Most 
of the cooler ones travel 21 miles a second. 
That is almost twice as fast as the sun 
moves. The stars that are almost dead 
usually move the fastest. Many of them 
are traveling about 43 miles a second. 

Some of the fastest stars could go 
around the earth in two minutes. These 
are called runaway stars. 

No one has yet been able to find out 
why the stars move in the way they do. 
At first astronomers could not even see 
which way they were moving. The stars 
are so very far away that it is hard to 
study their movements. 

Astronomers have worked very hard to 
find out about this. They have carefully 


34 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

measured the movements of the stars. 
They thought at first that each star was 
moving in a straight line. But now they 
have found out that this is not so. 



THESE LINES SEEM TO BE GOING IN MANY DIRECTIONS. YET 
EACH IS FOLLOWING A CURVE AROUND THE SAME CENTER. 
THIS IS HOW THE STARS MOVE AROUND THE CENTER OF THE 

GALAXY. 

To understand how the stars move we 
must know a little about how they are 
arranged in space. Astronomers tell us 


DREAM OF STARS 35 

that the stars in our neighborhood are 
scattered in such a way that the whole 
group would appear in space like a great 
watch. A watch is round if we look at it 
from one side. And it looks thin and flat 
if we look at it from the edge. That is 
how our star system or neighborhood 
would look if we could stand off and look 
at it. We call this star system the 
Galaxy. 

Now each star is moving around the 
center of the Galaxy, just as the earth 
moves around the sun. Each one is 
moving in its own path, or orbit. It only 
seems as though the stars are shooting 
through space in many directions without 
reason. They do move in many direc¬ 
tions, but each star is following a path 
around the center of the Galaxy. 

In spite of all this movement of the 
stars, we cannot see them change their 
places from year to year. But if we 


36 CHILDREN'S SCIENCE SERIES 

could see them thousands of years from 
now, we should see that they had moved 
quite a bit. 

Astronomers have been able to figure 
out exactly where some of the stars will 
be some day. They have made a map 
to show where the stars in the Big Bear 
will be in 50,000 years. 

THE PLANETS 

Suppose we sat down with a star map 
and learned all the different constella¬ 
tions. When we looked up at the sky 
we could find each one. We would know 
the names of all of them. 

But then, one night we might see in 
some constellation a star that was not 
there when we looked before. And we 
would feel just as the astronomers of old 
felt when they saw a strange star move 
into a constellation. We would see why 
this strange star is called a wanderer, 
or planet. 


DREAM OF STARS 


37 


The planets look a little different from 
the stars. The stars twinkle. Planets 
do not. They shine with a calm, clear 
light. 

They look very pretty to us. They 
don’t look frightening. Yet for a long 
time people were afraid of them. Be¬ 
cause they moved in such a surprising 
way, people thought they had a strange 
power. 

What are the planets and why do they 
wander over the sky? The planets are 
big round worlds that circle around the 
sun just as the earth does. They appear 
to wander around because all of them are 
circling the sun at different speeds. 

Today we know of nine planets. But 
only five of them can be seen without a 
telescope. These are Mercury, Venus, 
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each of 
them circles around the sun in a certain 
path. The path that a planet follows is 
called the orbit of the planet. 



NUMBERS SHOW DISTANCE IN MILES FROM EACH PLANET 
TO THE SUN. ON THE RIGHT, PLANETS ARE COMPARED 

IN SIZE. 










DREAM OF STARS 


39 


Some of the planets are quite near to 
the sun and some are very far away. 
Only two of them are nearer to the sun 
than the earth is. Mercury is the nearest. 
Then comes Venus. These two are quite 
small and they move fast. 

Some of the planets outside the earth’s 
orbit are very large and they all move 
more slowly. Their names are Mars, 
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and 
Pluto. 

Venus and Mars are the planets that 
come closest to the earth. So they look 
very bright. Venus is brighter than the 
brightest star in the sky. Mars shines 
with a clear red light. 

Venus and Mars are more like the 
earth than any of the other planets. 
One astronomer, Percival Lowell, thought 
that Mars might have people upon it. 
Many stories have been written about 
men on Mars. But astronomers are sure 


40 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

now that there are no men there, though 
there may be some other forms of living 
things. 

If we looked at the planets through a 
telescope, they would appear much bigger 
than the stars. Some of them would 
look bigger than the moon does without a 
telescope. Even through a telescope the 
stars just look like pinpoints of light. 

We can see many strange things about 
the planets through the telescope. Some 
of them have moons that circle around 
them as our moon circles around the 
earth. We can see that Mars has two 
moons. Jupiter has eleven moons. 
Saturn has nine. Uranus has four. And 
Neptune, like the earth, has only one. 
Mercury, Venus, and Pluto have none. 

If these planets are like the earth, why 
do they shine like stars? The planets 
really have no light of their own. The 
sun shines on the planets, just as it does 


DREAM OF STARS 


41 


on the moon. The moon and the planets 
are lighted by the sun just as clouds and 
trees and sky on earth are lighted by the 
sun during the day. When we see the 
planets shining, we are really seeing 
light from the sun. 

Astronomers can tell just where each 
planet is going to appear and when we 
can see it. If we study about the planets 
long enough, we can learn to do this too. 

COMETS AND SHOOTING STARS 

The planets are not the only wanderers 
of the sky. There are some things that 
wander even farther and longer. And 
they are called comets. Long after 
people had got over being frightened of 
planets, they still thought the comets 
were bad beasts that roamed the skies. 
They were afraid that the comet would 
suddenly turn on the earth, and destroy 
them. 


42 CHILDREN'S SCIENCE SERIES 



COMETS HAVE ROUND HEADS AND LONG TAILS, AND ARE VERY 
BRIGHT. 


But even if a comet did hit the earth, 
nothing much would happen. A comet 
is really a harmless thing. 




DREAM OF STARS 


43 


Comets have round heads and long 
tails, and they are very bright. Some¬ 
times they look like heads with long hair 
streaming behind them. That is why 
they are called comets. Comet means 
long-haired. 

Like the stars and planets, comets are 
far away, but we can measure their size. 
The head of a small comet is as wide as 
the Pacific Ocean. And a big comet’s 
head is ten times as big as the earth. 
Its tail is millions of miles long. Then 
why wouldn’t this great big thing hurt 
us if it hit the earth? Because it isn’t 
solid. It is thin like a cloud. Its tail is 
nothing but glowing gas. And its head 
is made of small pieces that could not 
hurt the earth. 

Some comets can be seen for a few 
months. Then they go away. Some of 
them come back in a certain number of 
years. Some are never seen again. 


44 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

Perhaps these comets that never return 
have broken into pieces. For some as¬ 
tronomers think that shooting stars are 
pieces of broken comets. 

Most of us have seen shooting stars on 
a warm summer night. They flash sud¬ 
denly across the sky and then they are 
gone. There are certain summer nights 
when we can see hundreds of these. 

Another name for shooting stars is 
meteors. Meteors are the only heavenly 
bodies that are not much bigger than 
they look. They really are small. Most 
of them are so small that we could hold 
hundreds of them in our hands. 

Often meteors fall to the earth and are 
found. They are made of stone or iron. 
Yet they were shining brightly when they 
fell through the sky. This was because 
they were going so fast. They were going 
so fast that they got very hot. This 
heat is made by air rubbing the meteor, 



A METEOR SHINES BRIGHTLY AS IT FALLS. IT IS COLD AND 
DULL WHEN WE FIND IT. 



46 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

just as pennies get hot if we rub them on 
a carpet. 

The meteors got so hot that they began 
to glow, just like red-hot iron. But they 
cooled off very quickly. When we find 
them they look much like any stone we 
would find in the fields, except that they 
often seem to have been burned or melted. 

OUR GUIDES AND FRIENDS 

But it is not comets or meteors that are 
of much use to us here on earth. It is 
the fixed stars that help us. They help 
sailors to find their way today, just as 
they did long ago. And they still help 
us to tell time. 

Our Navy has a building down in 
Washington, D. C., where men watch the 
stars all the time. This is called an 
observatory. The men at the observa¬ 
tory can tell exactly what time it is by 
the position of the stars. At certain 


DREAM OF STARS 47 

hours they check the time exactly and 
flash it by radio over all the land and to 
all the ships at sea. And so, no matter 
where they are, the captains of ships 
know exactly what time it is. 

When the captains know the exact 
time, they can look at the stars and figure 
out exactly where their ships are. The 
stars are a much better guide than any¬ 
thing else that man has discovered. 

Most of us do not need the stars to tell 
time or to find our way. Other people 
do this work for us. Most of us do not 
have a telescope to study the stars. 

But all of us can have fun with the 
stars. We can make the stars our 
friends. We can learn their names. 
We can find the constellations. We can 
see the shapes of the great giants and 
strong men that people long ago saw in 
the sky. 

Then, no matter how far we may travel 


48 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

later, we will always feel at home in the 
world. For wherever we go, we will find 
bright stars shining. They are friends 
that will never leave us. 



THE BIG BEAR, OR BIG DIPPER, AS IT IS TODAY (LEFT) AND 
AS IT WILL LOOK IN 50.000 YEARS. 












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